TangoHapps: An Integrated Development Environment for Smart Textiles

Construction kits and development environments have dramatically reduced the time and expertise required for the development of physical interactive devices. The field of smart textiles, however, is relatively new and still lacks of established tools that support their development. In this dissertation, we introduce TangoHapps, a visual programming and simulation environment specifically designed for smart textiles. TangoHapps supports different activities related to smart textile development, including application software development, testing and circuit design. TangoHapps’ visual programming semantics span across mobile phone and smart textile enabling users to take advantage of capabilities present on both devices without writing source code. TangoHapps has a high-ceiling, which we demonstrate by recreating two smart textiles from different application domains. Furthermore, we provide evidence from two user studies that TangoHapps lowers entrance barrier to smart textile development.